Shoe Signals

People often form opinions about strangers from a glance at their shoes. A study led by Omri Gillath, an associate professor of social psychology at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, has tested the accuracy of those assumptions. Participants not only made good guesses about people's age and earnings based on their shoes, they also correctly associated feminine-looking shoes with agreeableness, and dull, neutral-colored shoes with anxiety about being rejected or abandoned by others. Among the many wrong assumptions: that politically liberal people wear cheap, round-toed, unattractive shoes in poor repair, and that emotional stability correlates with the absence of high heels and pointy toes.